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When my colleague Bronte asked me to write a list of my ‘ten favourite books published over the course of my career at Readings’, I admit that I (audibly) groaned. How on earth was I going to be able to recall 21-years’ worth of books? It didn’t help that my personal library was already packed up in boxes pending the arrival of the container to ship all my possessions off to my new life in German…

Martin Shaw reports back from the Leading Edge Books and Australian Book Industry Award 2015 conferences.

So we’re all fresh from our annual conference which, as ever, re-charged the bookselling batteries with previews of the many highlights on the literary calendar for the remainder of 2015. Perhaps the book carrying the biggest buzz was the latest novel from Jonathan Franzen – Purity – advan…

Well what a frenetic time it’s been in the book world in recent weeks! We’ve had the announcement of the Stella Prize to our near Carlton neighbour Emily Bitto for her debut novel The Strays; the award of the Australian/Vogel’s Prize for an unpublished writer under 35 to Melbourne author Murray Middleton for When There’s Nowhere Else to Run; and the major US fiction awards: the Pulitzer to Anthon…

I must say I’ve been having a good run of late with the first book I read in any given year. Last year, for instance, I was gushing about Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil – so it’s been gratifying to see the reception it’s had since, including most recently her Stella Prize longlisting.

Rebecca Starford’s Bad Behaviour: A Memoir of Bullying and Boarding School is generating much excitement at Readings. After numerous sleep-deprived staff members turned up to work unable to think or speak of anything else, Martin Shaw decided to go straight to the source for the story behind this fantastic debut. Here, Martin and Rebecca discuss how this extraordinary memoir came about.

February is already a tremendous month. On the fiction front James Bradley returns after a lengthy spell between books with a wonderful novel entitled Clade. As many of you may know, James is a regular book reviewer, so when I caught him a few weeks ago describing a book under review as ‘thrillingly taut and idea-rich’, I couldn’t help but feel he had involuntarily penned a brilliant encapsulatio…